General Question

Unaccompanied children are crossing the US southern border in record numbers. Is this a US immigration crisis, making them undocumented immigrants, or is this a bigger international humanitarian crisis, making these kids refugees?

Since October of 2013, over 47,000 children have come to the Mexico/US border without the necessary documentation (visa, passport, etc). Most of these kids are not from Mexico, but from other Central American countries with extremely high murder rates, including Honduras (90.4 per 10,000 population), El Salvador (41.2/10k) and Guatemala (39.9/10k).—(source CNN Report on United Nations Global Study on Homicide).

There are some in the US (such as Rep. Jason Chaffetz [R., Utah]) who point to the lack of immigration reform as a reason for the spike. Others, such as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, state that these kids”... defy common perceptions of migration in this hemisphere. They are akin to refugees in Africa fleeing civil wars. They are literally fleeing for their lives.”

33 Answers

They expect 90,000 in the 2014 fiscal year. That’s a lot of people, in my opinion. According to the article, and common sense, word will spread and more will come. More that need shelter, services and money.

Borders are artificial. Human suffering is real. So while there may be a legal crisis of sorts regarding immigration, the humanitarian crisis is bigger and more important. What’s more, solving the humanitarian problem—i.e., making it so that these kids don’t feel the need to run away—will solve the legal problem. It won’t bring an end to questions about immigration more generally, of course, but there would be no reason for these kids to be causing this legal crisis if there were no humanitarian crisis driving it.

These children should be returned across the border to the South from whence they were thrown. It is time to close the borders until we get control of them. The average number of kids showing up here alone is 6,000 per year in recent years. Already this year it is 47,000…...this requires immediate action.

I’m sorry but the lame “there are reasonable responses to the crisis” is so much garbage. “How about you step up and outline those “reasonable responses” and their costs? How about each member of the NY Times editorial staff pledges ½ their salaries to solve the problem? At a rate of 47,000 per month, 564,000 per year, even if each one only requires 4 hours of a lawyer’s time, that is $564,000,000 dollars a year and that is only at $250/hour. Good luck finding a lawyer at that rate! The numbers are simply staggering and the flood will only increase. While some of these may be fleeing violence, many more are simply taking advantage of the lax (read non-existent) enforcement of our immigration laws.”

”...many more are simply taking advantage of the lax (read non-existent) enforcement of our immigration laws.”@jca, they don’t come just because our immigration laws are lax. They have a reason to want to come here. If they didn’t want to come here, they wouldn’t, even if we had NO immigration laws.

@jca It seems to me that saying “good points” is implicitly an endorsement. I realize that isn’t what you meant, but that’s why it came across differently. If the comment doesn’t express your own opinion, you might consider saying “interesting points” or even “interesting points, though I’m not sure I agree.”

In any case, I don’t think the comment raises good points. In fact, it’s a straw man. For one, it assumes that the only solution is for each refugee to consult a lawyer individually. But even if a court-based solution were needed, it would not follow that it would have to be done on an individual basis. That’s why we have the ability to take group actions to court.

We don’t necessarily need a court-based solution, however. It has already been suggested that the humanitarian problem could be addressed directly, thus indirectly addressing the legal problem caused by refugees crossing the border. This is why it is fallacious for the author of that comment to lump in the refugees with those who are crossing the border for other reasons. The problems have different solutions, and thus can be dealt with separately.

@jca But they have to have an underlying reason for wanting to come here. The fact that we have lax immigration laws is not a reason. If our immigration laws were really strict, those same people would still be trying to get in because of their original reason.

OK. But they’d still be trying to get in if our immigration laws were stricter, especially if their kids were suffering and dying from lack of shelter, food, medical care, etc. I don’t know why the US doesn’t just annex Mexico!

Let me clarify: The Mestizos were the people of mixed Spanish and American Indian heritage. The last wave of European Spaniards came in the 17th century. They would be more inclined to make maps and draw lines. The Indians would not. By 1836 the Mestizos would be more Indian-like than Spanish. There were no map drawing European Spaniards left. In addition to the Mesitizos who occupied Texas, you had the Apache, Arapaho, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chickasaw, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Delaware, Kiowa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Tonkawa…the list goes on and on. So WHO drew up a map in 1836 and said “This is Mexico?”